When Women Rule the Court: Gender, Race, and Japanese American Basketball

By Nicole Willms

Winner of the 2018 North American Society for the Sociology of Sport Book Award

For nearly one hundred years, basketball has been an important part of Japanese American life.  Women’s basketball holds a special place in the contemporary scene of highly organized and expansive Japanese American leagues in California, in part because these leagues have produced numerous talented female players. Using data from interviews and observations, Nicole Willms explores the interplay of social forces and community dynamics that have shaped this unique context of female athletic empowerment. As Japanese American women have excelled in mainstream basketball, they have emerged as local stars who have passed on the torch by becoming role models and building networks for others. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Aug 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9780813584171

Book preview

When Women Rule the Court

Critical Issues in Sport and Society

Michael Messner and Douglas Hartmann, Series Editors

Critical Issues in Sport and Society features scholarly books that help expand our understanding of the new and myriad ways in which sport is intertwined with social life in the contemporary world. Using the tools of various scholarly disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, history, media studies and others, books in this series investigate the growing impact of sport and sports-related activities on various aspects of social life as well as key developments and changes in the sporting world and emerging sporting practices. Series authors produce groundbreaking research that brings empirical and applied work together with cultural critique and historical perspectives written in an engaging, accessible format.

Jules Boykoff, Activism and the Olympics: Dissent at the Games in Vancouver and London

Diana T. Cohen, Iron Dads: Managing Family, Work, and Endurance Sport Identities

Jennifer Guiliano, Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America

Kathryn Henne, Testing for Athlete Citizenship: The Regulation of Doping and Sex in Sport

Jeffrey L. Kidder, Parkour and the City: Risk, Masculinity, and Meaning in a Postmodern Sport

Michael A. Messner and Michela Musto, eds., Child’s Play: Sport in Kids’ Worlds

Jeffrey Montez de Oca, Discipline and Indulgence: College Football, Media, and the American Way of Life during the Cold War

Stephen C. Poulson, Why Would Anyone Do That? Lifestyle Sport in the Twenty-First Century

Nicole Willms, When Women Rule the Court: Gender, Race, and Japanese American Basketball

When Women Rule the Court

Gender, Race, and Japanese American Basketball

Nicole Willms

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

978–0-8135–8415–7

978–0-8135–8416–4

978–0-8135–8417–1

978–0-8135–8418–8

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2017 by Nicole Willms

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

For my firstborn, Celia Tsutako Bingo

Contents

Introduction: This Is What We Do

1 Everybody Plays: The Inclusiveness of J-League Basketball

2 In JA Circles, Girls and Boys Are on Equal Footing: The (Re)negotiation of Gender in J-League Basketball

3 Women Who Took Sports beyond Play: How Japanese American Women’s Basketball Went to College

4 We’re Turning Them into Stars! The Japanese American Female Basketball Player as Icon

5 You Play Basketball? Ruling the Court as an Unexpected Athlete

Conclusion: It’s a Testament of What the Japanese Leagues Can Do for Young Girls

Acknowledgments

Methodological Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

When Women Rule the Court

Introduction

This Is What We Do

Entering the Japanese Cultural Institute Carnival in the summer of 2009, I smell teriyaki-style barbeque wafting through the hot June air. Looking for former University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and University of Southern California (USC) basketball players Natalie Nakase and Jamie Hagiya, I enter the main building—an elementary school—for refuge from the heat. In the upstairs library, several youngsters, mostly girls, hover around a nearby table waiting to surrender three dollars for a photo with the collegiate stars. It is a bit of a mad house: the cashier is being inundated with new photo requests, while also trying to handle printing the photos that were already taken. Slowing down the process, Nakase and Hagiya stop to talk to each of their fans and challenge them to a shooting contest at a play-size basketball hoop in the corner. The tallies are neatly recorded on the blackboard at the back of the room: USC versus UCLA, with USC currently leading. As each photo rolls off the printer, Nakase and Hagiya stop and sign it, writing special messages to their fans.

As community heroines, Nakase and Hagiya have been special invited guests at many similar events in Southern California. They represent an exceptional type of sport icon and role model, one who is not only remarkably talented and accomplished, but also accessible. As Japanese Americans—Nakase is third- and Hagiya fourth-generation—they engender a sense of ethnic identification and pride for many of their co-ethnic fans. More than that, many of the Japanese Americans at these events feel proud that their community helped create these star players. Nakase and Hagiya—along with a number of other Japanese American women who have played college-level basketball and beyond—are the fruition of a Japanese American community investment in women’s basketball.

More accurately, Japanese American community basketball leagues and tournaments (J-Leagues) have been an investment in basketball opportunities for all community members. However, on the tails of the successes of many female players, many J-League participants have expanded and developed new community resources that cultivate female talent. The institutionalization of early training and playing opportunities paired with an impressive Japanese American social network within the world of women’s basketball have created many channels for talented women to find places on high school, club/Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), and university basketball rosters.

Hagiya exemplifies this trend and has emerged as a distinct athletic icon for Japanese Americans, particularly in the greater Los Angeles area. She is also the original inspiration for this study. It was in the late fall of 2003 that I began attending women’s basketball games at the University of Southern California and noticed Hagiya, who was then a freshman point guard. When Hagiya enters the basketball game, there is no mistaking her. She’s kinetic, whether she is bringing the ball up the court, playing dizzyingly distracting defense, or whisking off nothing-but-net three-pointers. Her hair, which at the time she tied up in a high, braided ponytail, tends to swing to the rhythm of her ever-moving feet. She is quick, penetrating and indefatigable. She is a joy to watch.

Fairly quickly, I realized that I was not Hagiya’s only fan. In a fast-paced, entertainment-saturated city, a college women’s basketball game in the middle of South-Central Los Angeles rarely draws a crowd. So, with audiences commonly of just a couple hundred fans, it stood out that many of them—around fifty on an average night—were of Asian descent. Furthermore, perhaps not surprisingly, many of them were obviously there for Hagiya, producing roaring cheers when she made a basket and holding up signs with her name.

Soon after, the sociological imagination took hold and I began to wonder about the circumstances that had created this top-level player and the subsequent fan base that seemed to revel in her every move. Admittedly, her Asian ancestry was one reason why I was curious about her since it seemed like very few Asian Americans played in the higher divisions of college basketball. Yet somehow, I was even more excited by the fans. As a women’s basketball enthusiast, I have often lamented that many players and teams do not get the support they deserve. Therefore, I was intrigued not only by how this great basketball player had come to be, but also by how her fans had come to support her in this way.

Just by scratching the surface of Hagiya’s experience, I would begin to learn the rich story of a community—a community united, in part, by the game of basketball. Japanese Americans throughout many regions of California have created highly organized and expansive basketball networks that serve to unite thousands of Japanese Americans. Although some spots on teams are saved for non–Japanese Americans, the J-Leagues are viewed as a basketball network created by and for the Japanese American community, and many of the leagues and tournaments have policies of racial/ethnic exclusion in order to protect that goal (Chin 2012; King 2002).

The act of playing basketball as a community endeavor represents a larger, ongoing commitment to ethnic solidarity among many Japanese Americans in California. Ancestral connections to Japan and the collective experience of incarceration during World War II have historically united Japanese Americans living in communities along the West Coast. However, these past experiences are becoming distant from the lived experiences of the current generations. Longtime sport enthusiasts, many Japanese Americans have turned to community basketball as their most universal practice of Japanese American culture. Particularly for youth, it is a comfortable, if not necessary, way of doing Japanese American. As one scholar put it, The tradition of playing in the J-league is more than just a family custom or community expectation; it is a Japanese American community induction (Hedani 2015).

The Japanese Americans involved in J-Leagues tend to be passionate about what they have created. Some of the more enthusiastic participants start their children in youth clinics at the age of four and play themselves until well into their fifties and sixties. Many families sign up their children because playing in the J-Leagues is a way to establish a connection with an increasingly dispersed ethnic community. For many, it has become their primary connection, placing a greater significance on participation. Basketball has become more than a fun pastime. There is now an imperative that the J-Leagues remain a vibrant part of community life and be passed along to the next generation.

Over the nearly hundred-year history of Japanese American community involvement in basketball, girls and women have always been co-participants. In the contemporary context, their involvement has become even more important to the vision of the J-Leagues as an inclusive, meaningful, community-driven endeavor. Particularly at the youth level, offering nearly egalitarian playing opportunities to boys and girls has been key to fostering widespread community involvement. It could be argued that the more tenuous the links among Japanese Americans, the more important it has become to build a gender-inclusive basketball network.

As Title IX opened up more opportunities and college scholarships for female athletes, Japanese American women trained in the J-Leagues stood ready to take advantage of these new prospects.¹ This marked the beginning of a trend that continues to this day: Japanese American women have been a relatively small, but consistent presence in California collegiate basketball. Hagiya and Nakase are the most accomplished examples of what has become a fairly steady stream of female basketball talent emerging from the J-Leagues. Check the rosters of many of the California State University women’s basketball teams and you will likely see a Japanese surname. A few of the private colleges in Southern California, such as Chapman University and the University of La Verne, also consistently recruit from the J-League talent pool. Even the bigger women’s basketball powerhouses—UCLA, USC, UC Berkeley—have had Japanese American women on their rosters. The sustained presence of J-League women in collegiate basketball is in part due to networks of J-League-affiliated coaches—who not only train and mentor talented players, but also use their connections to cultivate opportunities.

As basketball is an activity of such importance to J-League participants, it possesses its own icons. The most prominent icons in the post–Title IX era have been young women who have emerged from the leagues to find success in collegiate basketball and beyond. Many Japanese American women have enjoyed a small taste of subcultural celebrity: fans come to their games, and the Los Angeles Japanese American newspaper, Rafu Shimpo, eagerly covers the highlights of their careers.

Nakase and Hagiya took their subcultural celebrity to the next level, and on their own home turf. The greater Los Angeles area is the epicenter of the J-Leagues, and Nakase and Hagiya are both from Los Angeles suburbs and grew up playing in the leagues. Each became a standout point guard at the one of the largest universities in Southern California. Hagiya, a dominant point guard at USC (2003–2008), would later go on to play basketball professionally in Europe and is now making a huge splash in the competitive CrossFit scene. Natalie Nakase made waves as a successful guard at UCLA (1998–2003) and then went on to play in a U.S. semiprofessional league, as well as professionally in Europe. After retiring from playing, she went on to break barriers in the world of men’s basketball: she coached a men’s professional team in Japan, and is now on the coaching staff of the Los Angeles Clippers, an NBA team.

The celebrated athletes are an outgrowth of the Japanese American community investment in women’s basketball, yet they themselves have become a widely dispersed symbolic resource, part of the dividends on this investment. After their playing careers, some of the well-known players have both given back to the community and simultaneously capitalized on their fame by running basketball camps, coaching youth teams, and training young athletes. Most stay close to the community—one might see them at J-League basketball tournaments, playing in the elite adult divisions or giving inspiring speeches during the opening ceremonies. However, the importance of their presence resonates beyond basketball environments: players also make featured appearances at community festivals, parades, carnivals, and fund-raisers, with a select few even receiving honors and keynote speaking engagements at prominent Japanese American organizations.

These successful players help to reinforce the practice of Japanese American basketball itself, but are also framed as heroines in ways that symbolize important elements of community identity. The success of Nakase and Hagiya, as well as that of all the other women whose names have been scattered across team rosters throughout California and beyond over the past forty-plus years, serves to confirm the purpose and potential of the J-Leagues as a community project. For many Japanese American participants in the J-Leagues, ethnic identity and solidarity are built not only in the practice of maintaining basketball leagues, but also through star players. These players become a source of pride and ethnic identification, as well as role models for youth. They are an attractive symbolic package—successful basketball players who embody idealized Japanese Americans citizenship, good girls who bring pride and esteem to the community.

Recently, Taiwanese American Jeremy Lin has been a major focus of attention as an Asian American basketball star. The 2012–2013 outpouring of media attention on Lin and a surge in scholarship on the surprise star (e.g., Combs and Wasserstrom 2013; Park 2015; Yep 2012) show that his success was momentous. However, in focusing on Lin, journalists and scholars are missing the predominant story since the passage of Title IX—that the majority of contemporary Asian American basketball stars have been women.

This book tells the story of women who became sport icons by looking specifically at the place of basketball in the Japanese American communities of California. As these communities created the institution of J-League basketball, they simultaneously reimagined the boundaries that define who is an expected or recognized athlete, who counts as a basketball player. As a community project, basketball is a shared asset not limited to the fastest or the tallest and not created solely for boys and men. A unique space for female athletic empowerment emerged.

Racial/Ethnic Community and Sport

Japanese Americans are far from unique in their community attachments to sport. In the modern era, numerous marginalized groups have engaged in community-exclusive engagements with sport. It has been an especially popular practice among first- and second-generation immigrants to the United States, as these groups have often sought out the comfort and safety of the ethnic community while at the same time feeling an attraction to the sporting pursuits valued by the dominant society (Franks 2010; Levine 1992; Gems 2013). Ethnic-exclusive sport was even more widespread in the first half of the twentieth century when more formal policies of racial segregation meant that even play at the YMCA was primarily with co-ethnics. In California, recreational teams were often made up of co-ethnics, but played against teams of different racial/ethnic backgrounds (Culver 2010; Yep 2009).

It was in the early twentieth century that Japanese Americans first became involved in playing sports, with the nisei, or second generation, most interested in basketball and baseball (Franks 2010, 2016; Regalado 2013). Chinese Americans in this era also engaged with a variety of sports (Park 2000), including baseball (Wren 2016), basketball (Yep 2009), and volleyball (Liang 2014; Nakamura 2016), and continue to do so to this day. White ethnic groups, such as Jewish Americans (Kugelmass 2007; Levine 1992; Sclar 2008) and Italian Americans (Gems 2013), also pursued sport as a community. Early traveling professional barnstorm basketball teams were often composed of one ethnic or racial group, such as Irish American, African American, or Chinese American (Yep 2009). Mexican Americans have also had notable historical community engagements with sport (Alamillo 2003; Balderrama and Santillan 2011; Innis-Jiménez 2009). Native Americans have played both traditional games and, since the era of boarding schools, been active participants in many American sports, often in tribal or intertribal exclusive spaces (Davies 2012). In addition to events such as the All-Indian Rodeo (Penrose 2003), several Native American nations have maintained strong community ties to basketball, which has helped them build intertribal connections. Davies (2012, 275) argues that basketball is a force that has helped American Indians create a shared intertribal sporting identity.

Emerging out of World War II and into the civil rights era, formal segregation in sport began to disappear. However, one can still find numerous examples of sports teams and leagues created by and for recent immigrant groups. For example, in Southern California, first- and second-generation Mexican Americans play in community leagues for teams composed of players from the same region in Mexico (Pescador 2004), and migrant laborers from Mexico set up their own soccer leagues in Salinas, California, in which many of their children also play (Figueroa 2003).

The attractiveness of ethnic-exclusive sport is likely the result of a push-pull phenomenon: the pull of shared culture—language, food, customs—and the push of being ostracized by the mainstream culture. The popularity among more recent immigrant groups is most comprehensible because of the strength of shared culture. However, how can we make sense of multigenerational Americans playing in ethnic sport leagues?

Asian American sport leagues and tournaments represent a thriving part of the contemporary sport scene (Franks 2016). They are at times panethnic, open to a wide range of players of Asian descent, and at other times ethnic-exclusive. Chinese Americans continue to hold annual national volleyball and basketball tournaments (Nakamura 2016). South Asian Americans play basketball in Indo-Pak leagues in Atlanta and participate in regional Asian American tournaments (Thangaraj 2015). Hmong Americans hold both Hmong-only and Asian American sport tournaments in the Midwest, where flag football and soccer are popular (Vang 2016). Although second-generation Americans seem to make up the majority of participants in many of these leagues and tournaments, this is not always the case. Particularly for Japanese and Chinese Americans, who are more likely to be third-, fourth-, or even fifth-generation Americans, the persistent desire to play on Asian American teams points to larger social contexts that create constraints on Asian American engagement with sport.

As I will discuss more fully later in this introduction, it is not a coincidence that it is groups of Asian Americans who are seeking out segregated sporting experiences. The dominant society often racializes Asian American bodies as not athletic, providing an incentive to play in environments where people do not carry these assumptions. It creates a safe space, away from the overt racism and microaggressions Asian Americans often face in mainstream sporting spaces (Chin 2015). It also allows the players to define themselves and their playing style in ways that feel good to them (Thangaraj 2015).

What is unique about contemporary Japanese American engagements with basketball? Although there are few other ethnic communities that match J-League basketball in terms of its longevity, scope, and size, what might most set this community most apart is the extent of its community investment in girls’ and women’s basketball.

Japanese Americans have been playing basketball as a community for nearly one hundred years, creating a feel of tradition, family bonding, and passing the torch to the next generation. Parents and their adult children sometimes play together. At times, the grandparents are still playing! The longevity of the community’s involvement with basketball, and the multigenerational environment it creates, is rare in community sport, although it does exist in some Chinese American sports (Nakamura 2016; Park 2000; Yep 2009) and in the sporting traditions of some Native American nations (Davies 2012).

The size and scope of today’s youth and adult J-Leagues are remarkable. How do the J-Leagues accommodate Lil Tigers (age four) up through the dirt or legend divisions (for players over fifty)? They do so by being large enough to facilitate multiple basketball-playing experiences—often divided by region, gender, age, and skill level. As a group with a higher than average median income (2006–2010 American Community Survey), Japanese participants are generally able to afford organization and tournament fees, helping to support the expansiveness of the playing opportunities. The scope may be unmatched, although the national network of Native American basketball tournaments may be a close second (Davies 2012).

How many are playing? When the Japanese American National Museum produced an exhibit on sport in the Japanese American community, they asked basketball community leaders to count the participants. The number for the Southern California region was estimated at ten thousand—and that is just Southern California! The more recent estimate is at fourteen thousand for the same region (King 2012). Fugita and O’Brien (1991) conducted a survey of Japanese American men in 1979–1980 in three major urban concentrations of Japanese Americans in California: Fresno, Gardena, and Sacramento. They found that 20.1 percent of Japanese American men were participating in a Japanese American sport league. This reflects only direct participation—the effects of the J-Leagues and their athletic icons reverberate throughout the Japanese American communities of California. The Little Tokyo Service Center produced a map (see image I.1) showing all of the contemporary organizations in Southern California that sponsor basketball teams for leagues and tournaments. The map illustrates the sheer number, as well as the wide geographical distribution, of J-League organizations in the greater Los Angeles area.

Because contemporary J-Leagues exist primarily in California, and most extensively in Southern California, they allow for larger networks of players and frequent, year-round competition. Most ethnic- or race-centered sport leagues are either smaller, based in one community, or hold only one or two regional or national tournaments a year. For examples, this is the model of the Indo-Pak leagues in Atlanta (Thangaraj 2015) and also holds true for several Native American nations (Anderson 2006; Davies 2012).

Image I.1. The World of Japanese American Basketball. Each icon on the map represents an organization involved with the J-Leagues in Southern California. (Credit: Mike Murase.)

Finally, not all ethnic leagues provide extensive opportunities for women. Indo-Pak and Hmong leagues and tournaments offer some limited playing opportunities for girls and women, but there is a clear gender hierarchy (Thangaraj 2015; Vang 2016). Women have had a long history of play in the Chinese Leagues of California (Yep 2009), but there just is not the community-wide support and infrastructure for a widespread engagement with sport—many Chinese American women interested in basketball migrate over to the J-Leagues. Many leagues officially reserve spots for their Chinese American counterparts.

For Japanese American women, timing has been everything. The first wave of Japanese American interest in basketball was in the 1920s, also a golden age for women’s basketball in California (Emery and Toohey-Costa 1991). Japanese Americans continued to create playing opportunities for girls and women, even in times when mainstream interest waned. However, only in the post–Title IX era have high school,